麻豆传媒

TINY balls of silica can transform the humble honey bee into a highly
effective mine detector, say researchers from the Sandia National Laboratories
in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Sandia researchers announced last year that they had been testing bees鈥�
ability to detect mines. There are about 120 million land mines strewn around
the world. Because bees have statically charged bodies they pick up explosive
particles just as they collect pollen, but the amounts are small, which makes
analysis difficult.

In a separate project the same team had been developing tiny nanospheres with
extensive networks of pores that trap particles and concentrate the amount of
explosives up to 500 times. 鈥淎lready having the spheres, the idea came that they
could be like artificial pollen,鈥� says team leader Jeffrey Brinker.

So the researchers began sending out bees with the nanospheres to turn them
into more sensitive detectors. Early tests have been promising, and the team
will get to work again once their hive emerges from hibernation in about a
month鈥檚 time.

Because various molecules can be built into the spheres, Brinker says the
next step will be to create spheres that indicate the presence of explosives
chemically, for example by changing colour. Other possibilities include using
spheres to detect biological weapons. 鈥淎ll these things are cooking along,鈥� says
Brinker.